With the meteoric rise of ChatGPT — a free and widely available artificial intelligence app — among today’s educators there is a debate about its proper place in the classroom. ChatGPT is unique for its ability to generate tailored content for virtually any subject, which causes some teachers to fear it could be a tool for cheating. As a result, certain school boards have even blocked the app from their Wi-Fi connections. Jamie Mitchell, however, runs a high school math tutorial at Aldershot School in Burlington and is exploring ChatGPT’s capability to solve challenging math problems with his students, who critique the results. He recently spoke with us about his decision to incorporate AI into the classroom – and its limitations.
When Jamie Mitchell first accessed ChatGPT, it was during a lunchtime math tutorial. His students asked if ChatGPT could craft a valedictorian speech, so they gave it two math jokes to include. Although the jokes were not particularly funny, the students found it amusing. This is how Mitchell began incorporating the AI into his teaching. He created a worksheet using ChatGPT and upon further inspection, discovered it was highly innacurate. Out of this realization, Mitchell decided to challenge his students to critique the AI’s answers.
Even though ChatGPT is an AI which appears to possess an infinite amount of knowledge, it struggles greatly with math. Since ChatGPT is a language AI, not a math AI, it has difficulty understanding the information it acquires. When Mitchell gave ChatGPT a series of optimization problems to solve, it could not get past the first question. The app indicated that the best way to cut a piece of wire into two pieces to make the greatest enclosed area was to cut the wire in half when it was, in fact, wrong. This demonstration taught the students the risks of using an AI without technological literacy.
The awareness of ChatGPT has been gradually increasing among Mitchell’s fellow instructors. He played a prank on his colleagues once by presenting them with various ways to use ChatGPT and revealed at the end that the whole email was written by the AI. This prompted several conversations around the app with some staff members even beginning to adopt it for specific tasks. One teacher used ChatGPT to generate an accommodation list for students with ADHD and another to help create bibliographies.
Though some educators express concerns about students cheating by delegating their work to ChatGPT, Mitchell does not fear this will be the case in his classroom. He provides his students with questions that require critical thinking and the ability to work backwards, such as video of a bouncing ball eventually entering into a bucket and he asked the students to create an equation to explain how. With such assignments, there is no way they could be fooled by the AI.
Though ChatGPT’s integration into the classroom is subject to accusations of it being a tool for cheating, Mitchell insists it is actually a tool to help with skills like teamwork, communication, and critical thinking. Students are given the opportunity to compare the AI’s output versus another person’s which allows them to gain life-long learning skills and understand when to use technology versus relying on the help of an adult.
ChatGPT is a free AI chatbot, created by Etobicoke-based inventor and developer, Rizwan S Muhammad. The chatbot, which stands for Chat General-Purpose Translator, is integrated into various services, such as Slack, Slackgroups, and Skype, and is used for various purposes such as providing customer and technical support, as well as adapting to conversational changes, entertaining users, or answering general and specific questions. The app is constantly improving as new data and sources are added. With its usage expanding among educators, it is possible that ChatGPT could one day dominate automated conversational processes in the classroom.
